Early Friends -- Connecting Deeply

Workshop # 15
Helene Pollock

Encounter Early Friends as people. Be open to their spiritual experience while exploring your own. Enhance your spiritual vocabulary, pondering the words early Friends used when talking about their lives. Create a courageous, creative, caring community. Test out an adult curriculum you can use at home.

Percentage of time:
Worship/worship-sharing 50; Lecture 15; Discussion 15; Experiential 20

Open to all

Each day we will explore a few brief texts written by early Friends (both men and women equally), seeking to resonate with the experience underneath the words.  We will try to be open to early Friends’ vocabulary when it is different from our own.  We will consider ways in which Biblical language can enhance our shared experience of depth.

I hope that our time together in the workshop can be characterized by ever-deepening trust.  I will invite people to join me in building bonds of caring among all people in the group, as we listen and share.  We will be open to different ways of talking about the dimension of depth and spirituality in our lives through small-group worship-sharing and reflection on queries.  There is no “right” or “wrong” spiritual language; what works is what is most clearly descriptive of the dimension of experience that is beyond words.

While my proposed 2008 workshop builds on our shared experience in 2007, a major difference will be that in 2008 we will be trying out a new curriculum that I have written.  The texts and queries for the curriculum are new; they were not part of my 2007 workshop.

Topics:

1. Dealing with ourselves, our deepest longing and desire for the workshop.

2. Our attitudes toward early Friends – both anticipation and trepidation.

3. Encounter with early Friends through brief texts.  Exploration of specific phrases or vocabulary words used by early Friends; seeing whether or not these phrases can be applied to our spiritual experience today.

Outline:

The initial day will provide a description of the workshop framework and will begin the community-building process.  Then we will engage in significant personal sharing in small groups to enhance our experience of trust in community.  Each day will include either 30-45 minutes of unprogrammed worship OR the “Experiment with Light” guided meditation (Rex Ambler) OR the Biblically-oriented approach to worship that is described in Michael Birkel’s Engaging Scripture: Reading the Bible with Early Friends.  There will be time for journaling most days.

I will come prepared with a 15-30 minute presentation each day, during which I will introduce texts and tell stories for the purpose of helping group members make connections between our contemporary spiritual experience and the experience of early Friends.  The approach to early Friends will be experiential rather than conceptual, notional or intellectual.

I have written a user-friendly curriculum about early Friends, which is intended to be adaptable to a wide range of Friends meetings or churches.  Each lesson includes one or more passages written by early Friends, a brief Biblical text, and queries related to a theme that was important to early Friends.  We will try out the curriculum during the Gathering workshop, encouraging group members to take leadership if they are so led.  Some themes for the various lessons include “Human Wisdom and Fleshly Wisdom,” “The Heart as an image of Depth,”  “Talking about Spiritual Challenges,” “The Seed of God.”, “The Light.” and “Living in the Cross.”

After having experienced the curriculum during this Gathering workshop, workshop participants who are interested can take the curriculum back and try it out at their meeting.  No special knowledge or historical training is required of the leader of the curriculum.  So if workshop participants have basic skills in leading group discussions they should be comfortable leading the curriculum in their home meeting.  The curriculum is intended to be done as a series of lessons.  Each lesson is based on a uniform one-hour-long format.  Each lesson has a simple one-page worksheet with queries and one or more short texts.  There is also supplementary material for those who want to do more reading and reflecting.  People can read the material at home if they can’t attend the session, so those who can’t attend irregularly can still be part of the series.  People who attend can prepare in advance, or not.  Those who don’t prepare will not be at a disadvantage in the class.  Those who do prepare in advance will need to restrain themselves from delivering “lectures” during the class.

As preparation, I would encourage people to select Bible passages that are relevant to their spiritual experience.  The methodology for the class and curriculum draws on Michael Birkel’s Engaging Scripture: Reading the Bible with Early Friends.  For advance reading, I would encourage people to read journals and other writings by early Friends.  A good starting point is anything by Isaac Penington, and Hidden From Plain Sight (early Quaker women’s writings).

Bring resources related to the Bible and/or early Friends, including music, poetry and art.  Bring a journal.